Monday, February 18th, 2008

DAN PERFECT"Paintings"

Chisenhale Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Dan Perfect.

Dan Perfect's paintings have a restless energy that permeates their dense compositions. Grounds and figures merge to depict a seething internal world with an imperative to create, connect and situate disparate elements. The paintings include a tumult of ambiguous forms and allusions to lost toys, dream characters, masks, animals, foliage and half-remembered places, as though before our eyes myriad options are sifted and assembled to define a character for each work.

Perfect's paintings make use of an eclectic set of art historical references, including Peter Lanyon's vertiginous, glider-flight inspired abstractions and Patrick Heron's late garden paintings, whose line, colour and light have strong echoes in Perfect's vivid conception of place. Perfect's work also has transatlantic strains of the graffiti-like compositions of Jean-Michel Basquiat with their drug-fuelled glee in palimpsests, chromatic clashes, defacement and strident affirmation of identity.

There is an urgent curiosity evident in Perfect's work that imagines a landscape populated by archetypes, where familiarity, loss and discovery collide. Leading us through this subsequent to the paintings' initial overall impact is Perfect's assured use of line that disciplines and delineates in order to avoid a descent into visual hysteria, and which connects the viewer to a panoply of decision-making. Perfect's free-associative works on paper, from which these paintings are developed, have an affinity with animation in their hermetically-sealed immediacy, and exploit the inherent instability and seductiveness of colour. Perfect's palette is sometimes reluctantly English, so that the compensatory and escapist dreamworld of America is filtered through the three-day week and power-cuts of Britain in the 1970's.

Steve Ditko and John Romita's deftly penned illustrations for Marvel Comics' The Amazing Spiderman are also a discernable presence in Perfect's work. Both Perfect and the Marvel illustrators employ a dynamic and compressed perspective to convey an action-packed supernatural world where the everyday and extraordinary are enmeshed and mutually dependant.

Perfect synthesizes vocabularies to paint something intensely personal so that, with their meticulous planning and process of playful and anxious discovery, these paintings present a frozen fragment of a larger flux. We are encouraged to witness the chaotic nature of an inner-life, and the consequent drive of these works to temper and deftly transform its content. Perfect's paintings present a picture of the world where fantasy and reality battle for the upper hand.

A fully illustrated catalogue published by Chisenhale Gallery accompanies the exhibition, with texts by Martin Herbert and Simon Wallis, and distributed by Ridinghouse Editions through Cornerhouse.

Dan Perfect was born in London in 1965. Group shows since 2001 have included Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys on the Life of the People, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London; Becks Futures, ICA, London (2002), which traveled to CCA, Glasgow and Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield; Exploring Landscape: Eight Views from Britain, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Recent Acquisitions, Southampton City Art Gallery. Solo shows since 2001 have included Floating Islands, Habitat, London; Perfect Drawings, Karsten Schubert, London (2003) and Recent Paintings at One in the Other, London (2006).

Sandman, 2006, 540 x 382

Antelope Canyon, Oil on linen 2005 183 x 246cm

Machineries of Joy, Oil on linen 2005 183 x 213cmDan Perfect's new paintings are pure pleasure. Weird heads and horned masks jostle for space in a field of painterly flourishes and vigorous marks. There's so much going on in each picture that they're almost impossible to describe. My notes for 'Masks' read: 'yellow profile head and black mask with white stripes; layers, splashes, salmon pink and lilac blotches, looping lines making pretzel-like squiggles and wobbly grids in black overlaid with pink'. The painting is based on two pastel and ink drawings that were scanned into a computer and superimposed; no wonder things get complicated. Two drawings are included in the show; more like spontaneous doodles and scribbles than premeditated designs, they are little powerhouses of exuberant energy. Enlarged many times over and traced on to canvas, they seem to be peopled by an exotic rabble of cartoon drop-outs and imaginary hybrids. 'Antelope Canyon' has the Wild West feel of a landscape dominated by giant cacti; 'Unusual Life' is like a jungle scene; and the inhabitants of 'Hung Out' look decidedly the worse for wear - dim-witted, spaced out or simply plastered. Perfect explains that, having studied printmaking, he approaches painting like a printmaker -building the image up in layers from a white ground and masking out some areas while working on others. This explains why his characters seem to be free-floating in ambiguous, almost virtual spaces with zero gravity. Everything works from the back forwards, from the first to the last or topmost layer; so there's no horizon line - only fluid, non-differentiated space. But it doesn't account for the wonderful sense of euphoria emanating from the pictures. You can tell that making them was fun. The spontaneity of the drawings hasn't been lost in translation; the variety of marks and uses of paint - from loose to tightly controlled, and from watery washes to juicy gestures and energetic flurries - communicates sensuous delight in the process of picture-making.

Dan Perfect at Chisenhale

Nicola Harvey, Frieze, 26 February 2008

There is apparently a new drug-resistant superbug burrowing its way into a minority of the San Francisco population. Its been named USA300 and by all accounts it could cause havoc on a mammoth scale. Under a microscope though, enlarged to titan proportions, this noxious bacteria is a visual splendour. Phosphorescent greens and an inky teal, usually reserved for the depths of the ocean, delicately encircle the pink nucleus. Such abstract precision reminds me that manmade attempts at luminosity are so often belittled by the boldness of natures own. The recent paintings of British artist Dan Perfect attempt to evoke a similar spectacle, but (aptly) succeed in revealing a Petri dish-type imagined universe defined by garish colours, morphed organic or architectural forms, and floating fragments of comic characters. It is a world in which even Ren and Stimpy would struggle to be heard.

Dominating the cavernous gallery space of Chisenhale are seven large paintings in oils and acrylics, each battling with the other for attention. At first glance the paintings could, reductively, be described as slightly manic abstractions. There is an obvious predilection for vivid mark-making, yet Perfect is engaged with neither the tactility nor limitations of the medium itself. There is a contrived deliberateness in each stroke that alludes to the possibility of every element of the work being representative. Aleph (2007) first appears to be a mash-up of earthy tones and harrowed scribbles, cemented to the canvas by a spraypainted blue dot. In contrast, Easter (2007) is a fragile network of spring tones, tightly controlled, it appears, by the remnants of stencil templates or silk screens. Any traces of the free-association drawings we are told inform the large paintings remain secondary to a well-devised design. But Easter in particular negates the artists concerted efforts to control the representation of his vast painted universe. Dominating the left side of the work is an unmarked landscape of raw linen from which the painted festivities seem to recoil revealing a surreal, barren wasteland. It is a successful counter to the graphic abundance evident in the majority of the work. The micro-details are only a part of the overwhelming nature of this show. Perfect seems to enjoy playing with the scope of the canvas and succeeds in evoking a different, almost antithetical reaction to each piece based on the viewers proximity to the canvas. Aleph, for example, becomes suggestively architectural when viewed from a distance. Grey and unrelenting, it is an environmental meditation, a gut reaction to the grimy landscape of East London on a wet winters day (which makes the accompanying press releases comparison to the St Ives School painters Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon unsurprising). At a distance, away from the microscope, Easter offers an insight into the mindscape of a gaming-obsessed youngster who dreams in technicolour and whose vision is punctuated by cropped manga characters, barren deserts and lollipops.

Mutated cartoon forms feature prominently in both Perfects past work and the current exhibition, demonstrating not just a visual awareness of and interest in the work of illustrators like Steve Ditko and John Kricfalusi, but an appropriation of the ideas that govern the Marvel Comics universe. Although American comic books often reference the sociopolitical, their alternate worlds are oases in which characters can bend the rules of human nature and societal strictures. They posit a system of polarities: good versus evil; sickness versus healing; death versus life; abstraction versus representation. Perfects is a similarly conflicted world. His paintings leave the viewer feeling either repelled or harmonious. One is not quite sure just how vile the subject matter really is; appropriate reflections of inner turmoil or not, there is simply no order or abstraction in Dan Perfects world.Dan Perfect

Chisenhale Gallery, London

Cherry Smyth, Art Review, Issue 20, p.15

Youre skeltering down a fire escape, chewing Bazooka Joes, listening to Glen Gould on your iPod, teetering at times on high heels, half macho, half meek, reading a Penguin Classic and answering your mobile phone, and it all works, this intellectual and physical multitasking, a mayhem that only makes sense temporarily while youre inside it, before you lose it, trip, choke, go back and say what? This is the sense Dan Perfects paintings give you, with their layered, giddy abstraction that seems to balance on the edge of caffeinated calamity. Here is Abstract Expressionism reined in, compressed, printed over, lasered and digitised, painting that exudes a noisy lyricism, an effervescent musicality that wipes the insouciance off the current graffitti-meets-graphic-designer cool. These are urban microfictions, all distant but interlinked, tangential narratives hopping between different time frames like a videogame.

Theres something decidedly English about Perfects dour-weather browns and greens, and then eclectic in their visual references, from Karen Appel to Charles Rennie Mackintosh. God knows how Perfect holds it all together, but he does, making the old formulae of applied craziness or controlled chaos seem irrelevant. The paintings swing between a studied mask-face or patch of spray-paint smoothness and improvised stretches of palette-knifed thick, pure colour. There are some snakes and ladders to play with bridges, walkways, tower blocks and crooked skulls that belong to Perfects own comic shorthand. Then he draws you into quieter swathes of raw canvas and delicate patterning that would look right on 1950s curtains. This is an adult, with the energy of a kid, having fun with the drunkeness of things being various. The blotches, blots and blocks of whats beneath create a mind map that seems to try to ask, How can we manage to speak to one another in the midst of this mess/mass?

But the artist clearly believes we can, and his vitality and purity of purpose are infectious. His gorgeous accrual of alphabets and sketches of joy in paint sings. It feels like fragmented dynamism of frenzied Internet-surfing that answers your questions and more and leaves you with a satisfied saturation. Village (all work 2007) is the most peopled, animated by characters one imagines might be called Bubble and Squeak, and it strives for a nursery innocence that seems unsure of itself. Better the darker pieces the microscopic cells and biological pipework suggested in Sandman, or when he lets the proliferation of marks do the emoting for you, as In Uproar and Aleph, which signal the misshapen, haphazard architecture of Hackney and the sudden colour burst from a window box in a grisly, exhausted estate. Dan Perfect

Chisenhale Gallery and One in the Other

Eline van der Vlist, Modern Painters, April 2008, p.83

Dan Perfects recent paintings are as exhilerating and exhausting as a first-time sightseeing trip to London. Looking at the seven large canvases on view at Chisenale Gallery and trying to grasp them put me in that wicked state between agony and ecstasy. Take the British artists The Fabricators (2006), a pandemonium of twisting lines and fragmented imagery on different planes, its gritty palette, with occasional flashes of strong color, capturing the contemporary urban landscape. The more brightly colored Sandman (2007) has no center or periphery, its swirling mass a torrential flux caught in the light of a strobe. Trying to find your way through the paintings is like trying to climb one of M.C.Eschers staircases. Your eyes come to rest when they find a recognizable figure - is that a rabbit on the left? Faces become apparent. Before dwelling on individual elements, however, it pays to consider each of the paintings in its entirety. That is where their real power lies. Their seeingly random composton is, in fact, a very careful balancing act minutely orchestrated by Perfect. Some insight into his working methods is given by his drawings, being shown concurrently at One in the Other. Much smaller, and in ink rather than oil, these act more like a series of intimate tryout concerts rather than a studio practice run. Like a true master of improvisation, Perfect is as comfortable in a small setting as he is on the big stage.

Brujo, 2005, Oil and acrylic on linen, 183 x 257 cm

Apparition, 2007, Oil and acrylic on linen, 183 x 257 cm Dan Perfects works merge the free-flow of painterly intuition with the visual impact of graphic design. Influenced from sources as diverse as street art, surrealism, art deco, and pop, Perfects abstract canvases resolve as explosions of suggestive forms and colours, each precariously balanced in the effusive currents of his compositions. Executed with flamboyant intensity, the raw energy conveyed through Perfects paintings reveals an engagement with both the intimacy of gesture and a coercive negotiation of mass media.Capturing the plastic hued excess of urban cacophony and TV screen blips, Perfects aesthetic of spontaneous action is the result of carefully considered process. Each painting is developed from his practice of making boldly expressive automatic drawings, elements of which are traced, overlapped, conglomerated, and modified as they are transferred onto the canvas. Coming from a background in print-making, Perfect builds up each canvas in a series of layers, concentrating on one visual component at a time and expatiating its form for maximum effect.Treating each motif as an individual entity, Perfects paintings present a chaotic sensation of spatial disorientation and weightlessness, as if arresting the velocity of imagination in freeze frame. Through combining flat fields of colour, delicate washes, and fervid brush strokes, with elements of heavily outlined illustration and ephemeral drawing, Perfect contrives a lexicon of painterly expression, reworking the signifiers of contemporary experience as consumables for infatuation and compulsion.

Hung Out, 2005, Oil and acrylic on linen , 183 x 213 cm

Desert Camp, 2004, oil and acrylic on canves, 183 x 214 cms

Death of the Family, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 183 x 214 cms

Deer Dog, 2004, oil and acrylic on Linen, 183 x 213 cm

The Hunt, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 183 x 214 cms

The ideas in my work are tightly bound to the physical performance of making them. My paintings are like imagined interior or psychological landscapes. You might think of them like stage sets or dramatic scenes from video games: their space doesnt go on forever, and they have rules and parameters. They arent real responses to nature, but re-imagined experiences, a way of bringing the outside world into my studio. They seem quite urban and technological, and theres a strong sense of science fiction in them. Its a decayed science fiction where tumultuous change and biological entropy is intervened and radically altered. My paintings are full of experimentation everything is partial: masks, costumes, body parts, animals that are human, humans that are animals, things are taken apart and exploded. History is rooted in biology but futurologists predict that we will soon be able to transcend our biology; in 50 years you may be able to upload yourself. In my paintings Im thinking about the nature of what it is to be us in this world right now.Perfects Brujo takes its title from Carlos Castenadas 1968 book The Teachings of Don Juan, which is an anthropological thesis often associated with hippie culture; a brujo is a shaman or sorcerer. All fables and stories have some purpose or resonance to them, explains Perfect. I like the idea of an anthropologist going out into the desert and being broken down. This painting is also influenced by Robert Blys writings on masculinity and ritual, expectations and inculcations. The world of the imagination is a world of magic. Its the anthropic principle that we project our inner contents on to outer objects: canvases are objects I project on to. In this way paintings are magical things. They are powerful objects like totems or icons.In my paintings I am looking to build up an absolute welter of complexity. The world is an intensely complex place and its a great deal of work to make that feel simple and flowing. Id like my paintings to be something like the Apple operating system its a wonderful outcrop of simplicity interfacing an enormous complexity, people can engage with it immediately. Theres a simple rightness and pleasure connected to that. In a funny way my paintings are big operating systems, written in lines of visual and historical code. Im interested in what it is to have a consistent and coherent identity. My work offers partial narratives of what constitutes you as the identifier. All the things in the pictures have some kind of a journey, a kind of nostalgia for the known: TV, comics, novels, different influences that have reached through to me. They imply a coherent personal or psychological identity, but also a wider cultural identity as well.I think fantasy is conjecture not escapism, its a way of re-imagining the world. Paintings are virtual spaces and I think of them as being endlessly mutable places or frameworks. In my paintings I try to make something that, in the immediate moment of viewing it, has an overwhelming sense of rightness. They have an aesthetic logic indicative of a potential belief in order, if not an actual order. Theyre all the time invoking chaos and dissolution, but I try to make them still and coherent as paintings. I dont work from source imagery at all, I try to make stuff up and improvise as much as possible. I try to stop the superego intervening and not let my critical other intervene. All the imagery formulates in a dream-like way: partial and confused narratives, the mishmash of everyday life, old memories, snippets of tunes, everything Ive ever seen. This material doesnt necessarily have meaning, its just what all the neurons in my brain are doing when theyre free-wheeling. In my paintings I try to shift, transpose, and super-organise this material into something architectural, something that has a weight about it that suggests meaning.My paintings require a lot of planning and technique, the manipulation of material is very time-consuming. They are extremely rich and dense, and I want them to be entertainment. That doesnt mean glib or superficial or saccharine: the ultimate goal of making art is making something truthful that you can get swept up in. I want my work to be spectacular, in the same way orchestral music can be spectacular. My paintings are melodic and have an expansive range of timbres, subtleties, nuances, and strengths, all exaggerated in large scale. I think about these in a performative way in relation to the audience. There is a strong sense of the absurd to my work, and the dark psychological context of the surrealists is related to what I do. My work is far more tongue in cheek though, and has a comedic aspect that comes out of some of the imagery, like the cartoon characters. Its about play, but theres nothing more serious than play.Though my paintings quote different kinds of aesthetics and textures, its all done with brush work. The first layer is made with water-based paint and can look like spray paint. The backgrounds are mutable and flux-like. I put sharper paint on slowly until things start to coalesce and appear out of the formlessness. I want things to emerge out of this organic mulch and build up rhythmic and density counterpoints. As artistic references Im interested in works by Per Kirkeby, Roberto Matta, Alan Davie and Van Gogh. The titles of my paintings are indicators towards partial narrative readings and I think of them as part of the painting palette. Theyre like a punctum or emotional provocateur. Village, for example how terrifying is the word village? This painting depicts the village of the damned to some extent: its community, its cellular proximity, information interchange. Its a lot more threatening than some of my other canvases. But its also quite bucolic a happy hell.With each painting I try to raise my own game in the technical production. It takes two to three months to make a piece and every moment has to be important. Thats why I think of my paintings as performances. They arrive from drawings which are manipulated and re-imagined digitally, and I have to reinvest every mark with an intensity or presence. When an orchestra plays, theyre not just playing notes, they have to make it alive and animate in the moment. Its the same with painting, each mark has to be made as if Im inventing it for the first time, which I am. It has a lot to do with the psychology of the work: its not just making something, but also trying to make it interdependent with your own psychological awareness. You have to be a bit of an athlete to make a painting. You have to be aware of your own body and movement, and know what youre like and what kind of person you are. Thats a part of the development of my work, to learn about my own capabilities.

Jungle 2005, Oil and acrylic on linen, 213 x 183cm

Unusual Life 2006, Oil and Acrylic on linen, 220 x 183cm

HEAD (DJINN), OIL AND ACRYLIC ON LINEN, 38 X 32 CM, 2009

HEAD (FURFUR), OIL AND ACRYLIC ON LINEN, 38 X 32 CM, 2009

HEAD (JORMUNGUND), OIL AND ACRYLIC ON LINEN, 38 X 32 CM, 2009

HEAD (KAPOHOIKAHIOLA), OIL AND ACRYLIC ON LINEN, 38 X 32 CM, 2009

HEAD (PERSEPHONE), OIL AND ACRYLIC ON LINEN, 38 X 32 CM, 2009

HEAD (QADESH), OIL AND ACRYLIC ON LINEN, 38 X 32 CM, 2009

HEAD (RAN), OIL AND ACRYLIC ON LINEN, 38 X 32 CM, 2009

HEAD (SHAMISEL), OIL AND ACRYLIC ON LINEN, 38 X 32 CM, 2009

HEAD (TENGU), OIL AND ACRYLIC ON LINEN, 38 X 32 CM, 2009

HEAD (UNGUD), OIL AND ACRYLIC ON LINEN, 38 X 32 CM, 2009

HEAD (VELES), OIL AND ACRYLIC ON LINEN, 38 X 32 CM, 2009

Dan Perfect: Dmonology

28 January9 April 2010, Karsten Schubert, 58 Lower John Street

Twenty-six numinous beings form Dan Perfects 2009Dmonologyseries on view at Karsten Schubert. FromHead (Amaethon) the Welsh agricultural deity toHead (Zadkiel) the biblical angel of mercy, they are a strange and indifferent company.Each painting bears a specific dmonic name chosen for its alphabetic sequence rather than the imagined attributes of a particular spirit. Perfect locates significance in the universal desire to animate the inanimate and to project human characteristics onto nature the anthropic principle. These small luminous paintings are full of unusual colours and unexpected shapes that simultaneously reveal and conceal a face.TheDmonology Headswere borne out of Perfects large-scale paintings, which he describes as thickets or landscapes dense with partial characters, abstract forms and digital processes transcribed into painted marks. The paintings, both large and small, challenge the viewer to discern faces or figures in the abstraction. In so doing, this group of portraits examines notions of illusion, projection and the make-believe, while firmly referencing our need to define and order the world around us.

PAINTER, PAINTER: DAN PERFECT, FIONA RAE

03 May 201412:00-06 June 2014

Both these artists find space between the abstract and the representational world in unique and distinctive ways. Committed to the expressive and enduring language of painting, they share a deep interest in our contemporary experience refracted through technology and cultural media, with manifestly different outcomes in their work. Perfect and Rae are married and live together, working in separate studios in the same building in London's East End. Painting's power is to conjure and focus an individual and idiosyncratic vision, and this exhibition is an opportunity to contemplate both the contrasts and connections between these individual artists' compelling artistic worlds. Rae and Perfect have exhibited together previously in various group exhibitions, but this is the first major simultaneous presentation of their paintings in a public gallery and museum. This exhibitionmarks the first dedicated contemporary painting exhibition at Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery for many years.

Fiona Rae is known for her bravura improvisation and iconoclastic unsettling of painting tropes and traditions. With a battery of graphic and painterly marks, signs, symbols and appropriated images, Rae continues to explore fearlessly what it is to be a modern painter in personal and dynamically vivid new works.

Dan Perfect's cinematically scaled paintings have a restless energy woven through their dense compositions. Grounds and figures interact to depict aseething interior world; the paintings are a tumult of ambiguous forms containing allusions to lost toys, dream characters and masks, with hybrid animal/humans roaming fictional interior landscapes - a mlange of the science-fictional and archetypal unconscious.

*This is a solitary activity, so even if you talk to friends a lot youre still on your own for hours on end. Youre going to bear so many hours of solitude over the years of being a painter. Dan Perfect

Painting is making a mark. Theres the need to impinge on the world in some way with some kind of thought or gesture or response, I think its a response to the world, and Ive chosen painting. Fiona Rae

Tom Hackney, Tabula,2013, Acrylic on printed reproduction, 20 x 20 cm

Tom Hackney (b.1977, UK) lives and works in London. Hackneys work is generated in response to specific historical materials encountered in the process of making, researching and reflecting. He does not consider himself a painter, despite his work often being comprised of paint. Rather than a formal engagement with paint itself, he is interested in painting as a mode, a vessel and a behaviour; a reverberating point of exchange between subjective and objective material.Hackney graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University (BA Fine Art, First Class) in 2000 and Goldsmiths College, University of London (MFA Fine Art) in 2008.